[Lingtyp] wordhood
David Gil
gil at shh.mpg.de
Fri Nov 17 14:41:33 UTC 2017
Just to clarify: I chose these five phenomena pretty much randomly, as
examples of the kinds of phenomena that people might use in order to
justify a language-specific category of Word in some language or
another. So they were clearly not meant to be exhaustive.
But they also weren't meant to constitute a comparative concept. What I
am suggesting might constitute a comparative concept of word is a
certain formal property shared by language-specific analyses positing
language-specific phonological domains motivated by language-specific
bundles of phenomena such as these five and numerous others. That
formal property boiling down essentially to the familiar idea (shared, I
believe, by many of us) of a unit of size intermediate between that of
morpheme and of phrase.
David
On 17/11/2017 20:22, Dryer, Matthew wrote:
>
> I think that these five phenomena can be considered a single
> comparative concept only if they are exhaustive in the sense that
> there cannot be any other phenomena that are arguably instances of the
> intended higher order concept they are instances of. In other words,
> it is not enough that the phenomena share something in common.
> Otherwise, we really have a disjunctive definition in disguise. After
> all, Martin’s meggle people all share the property of being people. It
> is not immediately obvious, however, that these five phenomena share
> some property to the exclusion of all others.
>
> But I am puzzled by Martin’s asking whether there is evidence for such
> an abstract property. It’s not clear what it would mean for there to
> be evidence for such a property. One needs to give an argument,
> perhaps, but surely not evidence.
>
> Matthew
>
> From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org
> <mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org>> on behalf of
> Martin Haspelmath <haspelmath at shh.mpg.de <mailto:haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>>
> Date: Wednesday, November 15, 2017 at 7:53 PM
> To: "lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> <mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>"
> <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> <mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>>
> Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] wordhood
>
> Christian Lehmann's paper on concepts and categories can be read as
> supporting the idea that comparative concepts can also be used for
> describing languages, but in a recent extended exchange with him, I
> understood that he actually supports the idea that structural
> descriptions and tertia comparationis (= comparative concepts) are on a
> different level.
>
> In any event, we seem to agree mostly that disjunctive definitions are
> "pointless" or even "incoherent" (as I have put it).
>
> David wants to argue that the diverse phenomena in different languages
> can be seen as reflecting some more abstract formal property. So for
> example, all of (1)-(5) could be seen to reflect phonological
> "bondedness" (or "same prosodic domain"):
>
> (1) vowel harmony
> (2) tone sandhi
> (3) progressive ATR assimilation
> (4) vowel reduction
> (5) preoralization of final nasals
>
> But my question is: Is there independent evidence for the existence of
> this abstract formal property?
>
> To go back to my absurd example of "meggle people": I could set up an
> abstract feature [megglehood] and claim that the various observable
> properties (Huawei smartphone, Mendelssohn music, taxi-driving) are just
> manifestations of this abstract feature.
>
> So is there reason to think that (1)-(5) are different? Well, for
> (1)-(3), one can give a substantive reason for their coherence: They are
> all assimilatory (though I'm not sure about tone sandhi). Intuitively,
> elements that are assimilated to each other have a strong "bond", so I
> would find it OK to regard them as manifestations of an abstract feature
> [bondedness].
>
> But (4)-(5) are not – they are merely restricted to particular domains,
> like all other grammatical rules. To the extent that different
> phonological rules appeal to the same domain, this gives us reasons to
> say that the domain has a privileged existence within the language
> (though even domains that are relevant only for one rule must be part of
> the grammar). But I don't see how such domains can serve as comparative
> concepts, if the reasons for setting them up are different from language
> to language.
>
> (Again, as I said earlier: Comparative concepts must eventually be based
> on substance – phonetic substance or semantic substance.
> Language-particular abstract concepts such as domains are not good for
> comparison.)
>
> Best,
> Martin
>
>
> On 15.11.17 10:25, Peter Arkadiev wrote:
>
> Thank you, David, this methodological (and theoretical) point of
> is utmost importance. I guess the point Christian Lehmann makes in
> his recent paper
> https://www.christianlehmann.eu/publ/lehmann_ling_concepts_categories.pdf
> is very similar in spirit.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Peter
>
> --
> Peter Arkadiev, PhD
> Institute of Slavic Studies
> Russian Academy of Sciences
> Leninsky prospekt 32-A 119991 Moscow
> peterarkadiev at yandex.ru <mailto:peterarkadiev at yandex.ru>
> http://inslav.ru/people/arkadev-petr-mihaylovich-peter-arkadiev
>
>
> 15.11.2017, 09:07, "David Gil" <gil at shh.mpg.de
> <mailto:gil at shh.mpg.de>>:
>
> In response to Bill's ...
>
> On 14/11/2017 23:37, William Croft wrote:
>
> A definition “variably interpreted in each language” is
> a disjunctive
> definition. If I use fact A to define ‘word’ in
> Language X, fact B to
> define ‘word’ in Language Y, and fact C to define
> ‘word’ in Language
> Z, then ‘word’ is defined as “defined by either A or B
> or C”. Or else
> ‘word’ means something different in Languages X, Y and
> Z, i.e. it is a
> language-specific concept, and the fact that it’s
> called ‘word’ in
> each language is just a coincidence.
>
> Sorry, but I just don't get this. If language X has a significant
> pattern involving, say, vowel harmony and some idiosyncratic rule
> preoralizing final nasals, language Y has a structurally somewhat
> different pattern involving tone sandhi and progressive ATR
> assimilation, while language Z makes use of patterns of stress
> and vowel
> reduction to define particular phonological domains, then they're
> obviously as different from each other as we all know
> languages to be.
> So yes, if John describes X as having an X-Word, Mary
> describes Y as
> having a Y-Word, and Bill describes Z as having a Z-Word, then
> these are
> indeed three language-specific and (in one sense of the word)
> incommensurate notions.
>
> And sure, defining a would-be comparative concept of word
> disjunctively,
> as X-Word OR Y-Word OR Z-Word OR ... would be unrevealing and
> rather
> pointless. (I was going to say "uninteresting", but that
> sounded too
> Chomskyan.) However, and here's the rub, there is no
> principled reason
> why it should not be possible to take John, Mary and Bill's
> descriptions
> of X, Y and Z and abstract away from them a shared formal
> property which
> we then might choose to refer to as a comparative concept of
> word. Yes,
> the comparative concept of word would be "variably interpreted
> in each
> language", but no, the definition of the comparative concept
> would not
> involve disjunctions; it would simply obtain at a higher level of
> abstraction than the language-specific phenomena that formed
> the basis
> for the original three language-specific descriptions. (Such
> abstractions are the bread and butter of our work as
> typologists, just
> stop and think for a moment how many cycles of abstraction are
> involved
> in a comparative concept such as "passive".) And crucially, it
> need not
> necessarily involve the kind of "clustering" that Martin was
> taking about.
>
> This is what I am trying to do with my proposed definition of
> comparative-concept word. Granted, the proof of the pudding is
> in the
> eating ... and I'm still a bit of a way from getting my
> definition to
> work, by which I mean being both implementable and
> interesting. But my
> point here and now is not to defend my (or any other)
> definition of
> word, but merely to argue that there is nothing incoherent in the
> attempt to define a comparative concept of word — even for
> those of us
> (myself included) who share a radically relativist view of
> linguistic
> typology.
>
> David
>
> --
> David Gil
>
> Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
> Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
> Kahlaische Strasse 10, 07745 Jena, Germany
>
> Email: gil at shh.mpg.de <mailto:gil at shh.mpg.de>
> Office Phone (Germany): +49-3641686834
> Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-81281162816
>
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> --
> Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at shh.mpg.de <mailto:haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>)
> Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
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--
David Gil
Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Kahlaische Strasse 10, 07745 Jena, Germany
Email: gil at shh.mpg.de
Office Phone (Germany): +49-3641686834
Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-81281162816
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